NerdHaven West Creates a Plan

The 30 Large Project is open for business, people. The idea is to get our finances under control and have a plan to create some kind of financial balance. I have a bad habit of being unorganized – undisciplined really – about my spending. I close my eyes and swipe my card. These days I am lucky because I do not doubt that the cashier will hand me the receipt with a smile (well, maybe not a smile). There have been times in the past when I have held my breath, crossed my fingers and swiped, not certain at all what the outcome would be.

Right now we are fortunate to be experiencing good times and I am grateful. I am able to be at home, because my husband is working (like crazy). There have been other times when we could not even consider a stay-at-home-mom option. And those days may come again (did I mention a daughter going to college?) And so, I think the way to be truly grateful for this time is not to waste it. I want to be disciplined and organized about our money now – and create a sustainable financial plan that can help carry us into the future.

As a start, I bought Elizabeth Warren’s book, All Your Worth, to give us a framework to analyze our finances and make decisions going forward. I chose this book because, first off, I love Elizabeth Warren. She speaks truth to power, as they say, so I felt she would likely be speaking the truth in her book. Also, her basic idea makes some common sense: in order for a financial plan to be sustainable, it needs to be reasonable and balanced.

Her idea of balanced is:

(a) 50 percent of after-tax income goes to “must-haves,” such as mortgage, utilities, food (more on this later), and things we are already in contracts for (cell phone);

(b) 20 percent of after-tax income goes to savings (which also includes credit card debt); and

(c) the remaining 30 percent goes to “wants,” which is basically everything else.

So we get everything – but in balance. Just like Weight Watchers.

It was heartening to go through Warren’s charts and see that, though we spend maybe too much in the “must have” category (we included our children’s private school tuition as a must have) we have a pretty good handle on savings (i.e., we are paying down our debt). What is left is just keeping those “wants” in check.

Based on Ms. Warren’s formula, we figure 30 percent of our weekly take home pay can go to “wants.” For example, this week’s “wants” will include football cleats and other sports supplies for the boy, and a graduation gown rental for the girl (why we have to pay for it this early, I do not know).

To keep track of my spending I have a check register and will give myself a “balance” of 30 percent of our weekly after-tax income (as well as a weekly amount for food – this money comes from the “must have” column – again more on food later). This “balance” will be our walking around money for the week for food and other household expenses that are not “must haves.” When I pay for something, I will – shocking I know – deduct it from my balance. I hope in this way to keep an eye on how we spend our dough and to create a limit (gasp!) on what we spend. Some weeks hopefully I can spend less. Some weeks will be much more (e.g., round-trip airfare to Florida for Thanksgiving). But the idea is to be disciplined, keep track and create balance. Maybe we can even save for those big budget family trips to Florida. I know – weird, right? We’ll see how it goes.

About the food costs thing I mentioned earlier: Ms. Warren says that the USDA estimated cost to feed a family of four is $650 a month. This book was written in 2005, and clearly food costs have risen since then. But we figured – what the heck – we’ll use the $650 amount. So I am going to try to feed us all for $650 a month. Already we have our CSA subscription of $37.80 a week so that’s $170 a month right there. So we’re talking roughly $100 a week for anything that we don’t get in the CSA box.

Limiting my food spending to $100 a week may be hard to do as I have this condition called, “Serious Whole Foods Addiction,” but that is the plan. Any extra costs, if there are any, (but I’m going to be so good there won’t be any) can just come out of our weekly “wants” amount. I mean, even though it is food, going to California Pizza Kitchen for dinner is not a “must have,” it’s a “want.” Although when I was working I have to say it sometimes felt like a sanity saving must have. These days, in my stay-at-home-Mom mode, it’s a luxury that I don’t even want. I’d rather cook at home.

True Life Experiment

Welcome to our blog!

Two sisters, both stay-at home moms on opposite sides of the country, try to do the (seemingly) impossible: maintain a blog – one with good writing, quality photos, yummy recipes and stories about the little things that loom large in our lives. When we both became stay-at-home moms (dare we say housewives?), we started out trying to write a blog about saving money (if you look at the first several posts you’ll see), but it turns out we just want to write about things that make us happy, and especially happy to be home. And while we find saving money to be something necessary, it just doesn’t always tickle our writing fancies. And we have some fancies that demand tickling.

Diane (Nerdhaven West): I am married and have two children, a daughter in college (already?) and a son in middle school. I live in Los Angeles, California. I am an attorney, but I left my legal-aid job to spend more time at home, while my husband, a filmmaker, is away working. After spending too much time over the years at jobs I mostly loved, I wanted to spend more time attending to the quality of my family’s domestic life. I also teach yoga. I like funky music, gardening with natives and edibles, cooking and eating and other creative pursuits. I raise chickens. I have a whole shelf in my bedroom closet devoted to storing homemade preserved foods such as pickled carrots, mandarin mostarda, grapefruit jam and two kinds of booze (when the zombie apocalypse comes, the party will be at my house). I like to save money and be responsible – but I also like to spend money and do kooky things sometimes, too. I hope that writing this blog makes me more responsible in my writing practice. Do you think blogging could also help me lose an inch or two of belly fat? That would be sweet.

Denise (Nerdhaven South): My husband, a professor, and I married in our forties in Gainesville, Florida. Work didn’t hold the same allure for me after I gave birth to our daughter a year later. So I left my full-time public relations job, and a second full-time pursuit of magazine publishing, for a life of free-lance writing and child wrangling. Among other activities, I love reading, travel, history, music, building local community, and plotting to turn my lot-and-a-half into an edible landscape one plant at a time. I love writing about the little things that combine to create a magical life. Those things surround me, and I recognize them when I remember to keep open a traveler’s eye — maintain a fresh perspective on the everyday. I travel as much as possible, often with my daughter or the whole family, to remind myself of what I have at home and of the miracles that exist in the world.